The context was the recent initial public offering (IPO) of Forty Seven Inc.. a company co-founded by Dr. Weissman. That IPO followed news that two Phase 2 clinical trials being run by Forty Seven Inc. were demonstrating promising results against hard-to-treat cancers.

Dr. Weissman says the therapies used a combination of two monoclonal antibodies, 5F9 from Forty Seven Inc. and Rituximab (an already FDA-approved treatment for cancer and rheumatoid arthritis) which:

“Led to about a 50% overall remission rate when used on patients who had relapsed, multi-site disease refractory to rituximab-plus-chemotherapy. Most of those patients have shown a complete remission, although it’s too early to tell if this is complete for life.”

5F9 attacks a molecule called CD47 that appears on the surface of cancer cells. Dr. Weissman calls CD47 a “don’t eat me signal” that protects the cancer against the body’s own immune system. By blocking the action of CD47, 5F9 strips away that “don’t eat me signal” leaving the cancer vulnerable to the patient’s immune system. We have blogged about this work here and here.

The news from these trials is encouraging. But what was gratifying about Dr. Weissman’s statement is his generosity in sharing credit for the work with CIRM.

Here is what he wrote:

“What is unusual about Forty Seven is that not only the discovery, but its entire preclinical development and testing of toxicity, etc. as well as filing two Investigational New Drug [IND] applications to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US and to the MHRA in the UK, as well as much of the Phase 1 trials were carried out by a Stanford team led by two of the discoverers, Ravi Majeti and Irving Weissman at Stanford, and not at a company.

The major support came from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine [CIRM], funded by Proposition 71, as well as the Ludwig Cancer Research Foundation at the Ludwig Center for Cancer Stem Cell Research at Stanford. CIRM will share in downstream royalties coming to Stanford as part of the agreement for funding this development.

This part of the state initiative, Proposition 71, is highly innovative and allows the discoverers of a field to guide its early phases rather than licensing it to a biotech or a pharmaceutical company before the value and safety of the discovery are sufficiently mature to be known. Most therapies at early-stage biotechs are lost in what is called the ‘valley of death’, wherein funding is very difficult to raise; many times the failure can be attributed to losing the expertise of the discoverers of the field.”

Dr. Weissman also had praise for CIRM’s funding model which requires companies that produce successful, profitable therapies – thanks to CIRM support – to return a portion of those profits to California. Most other funding agencies don’t have those requirements.

“US federal funds, from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) similarly support discovery but cannot fund more than a few projects to, and through, early phase clinical trials. And, under the Bayh-Dole Act, the universities keep all of the equity and royalties derived from licensing discoveries. In that model no money flows back to the agency (or the public), and nearly a decade of level or less than level funding (at the national level) has severely reduced academic research. So this experiment of funding (the NIH or the CIRM model) is now entering into the phase that the public will find out which model is best for bringing new discoveries and new companies to the US and its research and clinical trials community.”

We have been funding Dr. Weissman’s work since 2006. In fact, he was one of the first recipients of CIRM funding. It’s starting to look like a very good investment indeed.